My first Monday without chemo. My first week without radiation. What to do, what to do? I finished treatment on Friday! It’s such a weird feeling to be done. At the beginning it seemed insurmountable. There was no way I was going to be able to go to the hospital five days a week for treatment. And now? All done.
I feel pretty okay right now. The second degree burns on my chest are irritating and I’m not sleeping very well because of it. (I’m also becoming more used to not wearing a bra, so yay!) I don’t enjoy having to get up at three or four in the morning to re-apply “boob lube.” Which is what I call the mix of Aquaphor and Lidocaine gel that makes my burn, at the least, manageable.
The radiation exhaustion definitely got me in the end. The last couple of days I haven’t woken up until almost eleven o’clock. But the getting up in the middle of the night doesn’t help either, or the, like, two positions that are slightly less uncomfortable to sleep in. Bet you never thought about how having your chest skin move would make it hard to get comfortable, huh? Even after having a hysterectomy and my gallbladder removed, I forgot about how much you use your “core” for everything.
I definitely have a little bit of ‘’imposter syndrome’’” I didn’t really have any symptoms before being diagnosed with cancer, my treatment for the most part was easy (well, except for the burns,) I had almost no chemo symptoms and what I did have were pretty mild. I even kept all (most) of my hair.
So what’s next? Friday I go in for my first post treatment scans. I’m a little freaked out by that. The whole time, the oncologists were saying there wouldn’t be any scans for two or three months, since radiation takes time to finish doing it’s thing and there is probably going to be some inflammation.
But now they are saying that if I do need surgery that it will be much easier to do it before all of the radiation induced scar tissue forms. So right now, I’m just going over all the situations in my head, constantly.
- The tumor is gone. I don’t need surgery. I just have to go in for periodic scans.
- 2. The tumor is still there but it’s smaller or just dead tissue and I need surgery to remove what’s left.
3.Treatment didn’t work and then…
Well, I don’t know what then.
Also, I’ve decided that the word “tumor” is right up there with the words “panties” and “moist” in as far as how much I hate using them. It sounds dirty somehow, like I did something wrong and now I have a tumor. Is that weird? What words make you cringe?
